The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In

Published: August 7, 2013

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“ ‘All this would be easier if you didn’t work,’ ” O’Donnel recalled her husband saying. “I was so stressed,” she told me. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ We’d made plenty of money. We’d saved plenty of money.” She quit her job, trading in a life of business meetings, client dinners and commissions for homework help, a “dream house” renovation and a third pregnancy. “I really thought it was what I had to do to save my marriage,” she said.

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But the tensions in her marriage didn’t improve. The couple’s long-term issues of anger, jealousy and control got worse as O’Donnel’s dependency grew and a sense of personal dislocation set in. Without a salary or an independent work identity, her self-confidence plummeted.

“I felt like such a loser,” she said. “I poured myself into the kids and soccer. I didn’t know how to deal with the downtime. I did all the volunteering, ran the auctions. It was my way of coping.”

Five years after leaving her Oracle job, O’Donnel began volunteering for Girls on the Run, a nonprofit group devoted to girls’ emotional empowerment and physical well-being, and was eventually hired part time, at low pay. She loved the work. The organization’s message, about respecting yourself and surrounding yourself with people who appreciate you, resonated with her. “I started feeling very devalued when I was with him,” O’Donnel said of her husband, “but when I was doing all this nonprofit stuff, I felt great.”

O’Donnel and Eisel agree the job drove a destructive wedge between them. “I look back on it as the beginning of the end of our marriage,” Eisel said when we talked by phone last month. “Once she started to work, she started to place more value in herself, and because she put more value in herself, she put herself in front of a lot of things — family, and ultimately, her marriage.”

Jeff Brown for The New York Times

Sheilah O’Donnel with her children at home in Chevy Chase, Md.

O’Donnel’s family encouraged her to leave. But with three young children and no means of support, she couldn’t see a way out. Eventually, after a particularly bad fight, she went to see a lawyer.

“He said, ‘Before you do anything, you get a job,’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘Everyone I spoke with said you don’t get a job because your spouse will have to pay less in alimony and child support.’ He said, ‘You have to look at the next 30 years of your life, and if you’re in control of the situation, and you have a job that’s paying you money, he’s going to be far less powerful over you in the process.’ ”

A few weeks later, O’Donnel separated from her husband. She soon ran into an old Oracle colleague in a doctor’s waiting room. The woman was working at Monster.com, the employment Web site, and encouraged O’Donnel to get in touch. One former Oracle connection led to another. O’Donnel found that her reputation — 11 years out — was still intact, and she was quickly offered a job. But while she waited for her first paycheck, she found herself with no access to cash. She took a big chunk out of her old 401(k) and borrowed money from her sister. It was “the scariest time in my entire life,” she told me when we first spoke last summer.

What had been a nasty divorce was entering its end stages and the “60 Minutes” interview had come up. When O’Donnel saw the video again, the image of her younger self, giving up her job and proclaiming the benefits of staying at home haunted her. “I was this woman who made this great ‘choice,’ ” she said, sadly. “It wasn’t the perfect fairy-tale ending.”

I reached out to O’Donnel — and nearly two dozen other women — because I was curious, after 10 years and many, many “why women still can’t have it all” debates, to know what happened to the mothers who gave up promising careers in the late 1990s and early 2000s to be home with their children.